We are proud to announce that, as of today: Snap Attack is available on all platforms! Android was our final platform and we are available in the Google Play Store right now. Snap Attack on Android offers all of the great features of Snap Attack on other platforms, including fun, addictive real-time multiplayer word building and support for Xbox with 10 free achievements and 50 Gamerscore. You can also sign in with your Facebook or play anonymously as a guest. Puzzles are available in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Italian and we fully support all device shapes and sizes from phones to phablets to tablets. So if you have an Android device… give us a whirl!

Here’s our original announcement post when we shipped on Windows and Windows Phone earlier this year:

Today we are excited to announce the availability of Snap Attack on iOS. It is a universal app and takes full advantage of both the iPhone and iPad, and is available in four puzzle languages: English, Spanish, French, and Italian. Like Wordament on iOS, we support Xbox sign-in with 10 achievements and 50 Gamescore. We also support Facebook and Guest sign-in, although when playing as a Guest you will not collect personal statistics or appear in our persistent leaderboards.

Check out Wordament.com for more information, including valuable tips and tricks. Here’s our original announcement post when we shipped on Windows and Windows Phone earlier this year:

A few weeks back, we asked on Facebook what letters are the most challenging for you in Wordament Snap Attack. ‘V’ was one of the top answers to that question. We did a little digging and pulled out the top ‘V’ words you should know. The following lists were made by searching through all the past puzzles we have served, and counting the occurrence of words that contain a ‘V’ in a Snap. Here are the top 20 ‘V’ words, that appear most frequently in our Snaps, bucketed by length.

Show off your Wordament and Snap Attack pride with the new Wordament Desktop Theme. This theme pack contains 24 stunning Wordament and Snap Attack background images for your Windows PC. We run them in the office and we thought we should share them with the Wordament community.

In this video, YVI Quality Manager and Master Snap Attacker Mark Grinols explains how taking about 10 seconds to analyze the board and rack prior to making your first play can be the difference between a meh round and a first place rank. Enjoy.

So you’ve been playing Wordament for years now but you still haven’t unlocked that World Champ achievement… How about we strike a little deal? If we all work together and get our Facebook page up to 100K likes in the month of June, then we award World Champ to anyone that plays a full round of Wordament on July 4th. It’s that simple, get the page to 100K likes, and you can get that coveted World Champ achievement.

Today we shipped an updated version of Snap Attack for Windows and Windows Phone, which bumps the version number to 1.0.1. For the most part, this build fixes some performance and stability issues that we heard from players during the first few weeks since shipping.

There are two notable changes that we want to call out:

Snap Attack will not play the home screen music if you are already playing background music through any music app.

We’ve updated the text of the Addict achievement to properly match when it unlocks: at 2,500,000 points. We had incorrectly listed it as 250,000 points, which was a typo from the World Champ achievement in Wordament.

When we make new games like Snap Attack, we are never exactly sure how great players are going to play the game. Sure, we make our best guesses at what top scores will be and what the best strategies are, but the truth is, you don’t really know much until you ship. Now that we have been released for a few weeks, we are starting to see what great players really look like. Anecdotally, before we shipped, nobody on the development team scored over 11K.

Today I’m proud to show you playback from three legitimate games over 20K. Continue reading →

Like the 2 letter word list we published last week, it can be very helpful to know the Q words that don’t require a U. This is useful in both Wordament and Snap Attack. So over the weekend, we combed through our English lexicon and created two lists. The first list contains all the words that can be played with a Q and don’t require a U. The second list shows Q words that contain a U, but not a QU digraph. Commit these to memory if you want to get big scores and impress your friends. Continue reading →

Did you know there are 16 different puzzle types in Snap Attack? While developing the game we needed a way to talk about the various puzzle types, so we gave them code names. We felt it would be helpful to introduce these so we have a common way to identify the puzzles.

The “givens” are the words formed by the immovable black tiles when the round first starts. Many of the puzzle types are named after the shape suggested by the layout of the givens. These shapes are sometimes shifted one way or another, and are often flipped horizontally, vertically or both.

Each puzzle also contains multiple word and letter bonus tiles. Using these bonuses effectively is one of the best ways to reach a higher score. In most puzzles types the bonuses are positioned randomly, but in some puzzles types the word bonuses are in fixed, never-changing positions. In all cases we make sure that plenty of snaps can hit the bonuses – this helps ensure high scoring rounds and makes the game more fun.

Here are the currently running puzzle types. Come tell us which ones are your favorites on Facebook.

The first game of Wordament Snap Attack ever played was many months ago and it was on a piece of paper. The development team sat around one of our conference room tables with a print out, made in PowerPoint that resembled the boards we now play in Snap Attack. We wrote down lists of Snaps we could make and then we hand scored them after an hour glass ran out. There were no sounds, no animations and no leaderboards, but we knew were on to something fun. After that first round, we started talking strategy and in the coming months we watched as some of us became better players than others by employing various approaches to the game. Continue reading →

In Snap Attack, it is not uncommon to be able to play the same word in multiple places on the board. Each of these Snaps is scored, so you can easily rack up points by playing the same words all over the board. This is unlike Wordament, where you may only earn points for a single word once per round. The reason for this is in the very nature of the two games: Wordament is about word finding–and you are rewarded for each unique word you can find. Snap Attack is about Snap building–you are rewarded not for the words, but for each unique Snap (or collection of words) that you can build. This is why each Snap is shown with a little graphic next to it: That graphic represents that specific Snap’s shape. Notice in the image below, that when the Snap for LAKE is built and attached to the E in LANCES, the little shape shows your blue tiles, along with the black tile where you attached. Continue reading →

One of the key strategies in Snap Attack is to build two-letter words. Lots of them. So, you need to know your two letter words to be a terrific player. Below, are the legal two letter words accepted by Snap Attack in each puzzle language we support. Because we are native English speakers, we added definitions for each of the two-letter words.

UPDATE: Thanks to the help of our terrific community of players, we now have definitions in Spanish, French, Italian, and Finnish! We will get these edited and up here soon! Continue reading →

Today we are thrilled to unveil the newest member of the Wordament franchise: Wordament® Snap Attack® – the constant word tournament. Snap Attack is available today on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.1.

Snap Attack is an entirely new kind of word building game built on the heritage of the Wordament, with a new game mechanic that we think you’ll love—we know we do! Snap Attack is game about building combinations of words. In each 2 ½ minute round, you compete with thousands of other players at once, trying to get the best score. All players use the exact same board and rack of tiles. Points are earned by building combinations of words, or as we call them, “Snaps.” Your score is then ranked against everyone that just played that round and you’ll immediately see how you did. Continue reading →

Today we are unveiling the 2013 Hall of Fame results on Wordament.com. This contains the top 250 players in each puzzle language from April – December 2013. Why April? Well, our app originally shipped as an indie game on April 1, 2011. We published our first Hall of Fame at the one-year mark for our app, and it summarized all of our top players way back before we had either Xbox or Facebook sign-in. On April 28th, 2012, we shipped the first version of Microsoft Wordament on Windows Phones, and then released the 2012 Hall of Fame in April of 2013 (one year later). As we’ve grown up, we have moved into better and better cadences of doing things. This year, we reset our leaderboards on the year, just as we said we would, back in April.

Looking back, 2013 was a great year for Wordament and a great year for our team. Continue reading →

This is a question we’ve been hearing quite a bit lately, so we thought we would explain our reason for why it’s so difficult to unlock and then tell you what you’ll need to concentrate on if you truly wish to conquer this achievement.

To be perfectly honest: we made this achievement difficult because we wanted to make certain that it goes to the game’s true champions. This achievement is a mark of a deeply committed player to our game and IS achievable by anyone that wants to get it… but you have to earn it.

The achievement text itself is deceptively simple: “Appear in the top 250 positions in any of the Top Players leaderboards.” Part of the reason it’s not more descriptive is that’s about the longest piece of text we can write there. Digging a little deeper, there’s some additional details. Continue reading →

Today we shipped an update to Wordament for Windows 8.0 and 8.1 (both RT and x86) that has been in the works for many months. This update brings to Windows all of the great features you’ve come to know and love on Windows Phone, including Facebook sign-in, Guest mode and Tap to share scores. In addition to these great features we’ve also added fluid layout support. So, if you are running on Windows 8.1 you can now size Wordament to any size you like and we will layout in a way that best takes advantage of the space. This was no small feat. It’s hard enough to design great software, but to do it seamlessly at arbitrary sizes, took some careful planning. We are really happy with how this release has turned out. The coolest thing about the new Wordament on Windows 8.x, though? It’s an engineering feature–and it’s really nerdy. Historically, though, many readers have appreciated engineering tales, so we’ll share:

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